Leigh Hunt

(1784-1859)

Leigh Hunt studied at Christ's Hospital where he wrote the schoolboy verses published in Juvenilia (1801). As a journalist he edited the Examiner (1808), Reflector (1810), and the Indicator (1819). In 1813 he was incarcerated for libeling the Prince Regent; while in prison he named his daughter after Spenser's Florimel. In 1822 Hunt traveled to Italy where he projected The Liberal with Byron and Shelley before returning to London in 1825. He was granted a government pension in 1847; his annotated copy of Todd's Variorum Spenser is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.